FTP Dropboxes – For Online File Sharing

Do you ever have documents, presentations or other business files that are too large to send by email? Wish you had a convenient online location to store and share the most current version your documents?

Then you might want to create some FTP Dropboxes.

An FTP Dropbox is a password-protected area of your Web Hosting space that you can access with an FTP program such as FileZilla or SmartFTP.

FTP Dropboxes make it easy to share files with colleagues, partners, and clients on the Internet.

With EarthLink Web Hosting services you can have as many FTP Dropboxes as you have mailboxes on your Web Hosting or Ecommerce Hosting account, from 100 – 1,000 depending on your plan.

Note: Any FTP Dropbox you create is associated with an email address/box and the dropbox will share the same email password. But your dropboxes do not use your mailbox space – they share your Web site’s disk space allowance.

How to Create an FTP Dropbox

Sign in to your EarthLink Web Hosting Control Center https://control.earthlink.net/ at control.earthlink.net with your domain name, username and password.

Click on the Email tab.

If you want to create a new email mailbox and FTP dropbox together in one step, click the Add Mailbox button.

Enter the email address you want for the mailbox, create and confirm a password, check Add an FTP Dropbox to this mailbox, and click the Save button.

If you’ve already created a mailbox and you want to add an FTP Dropbox, click the Edit account icon (looks like paper and pencil) under Accounts on the left side of the Email page.

At the bottom of the new Edit Mailbox page, under FTP Dropbox: Disabled, click the Enable button.

Warnings: Before you share an FTP Dropbox, remember that the password for the FTP Dropbox is the same as its corresponding mailbox. Anyone with access to the dropbox has access to the mailbox and its contents.

Accessing Your FTP Dropbox

After you’ve created your dropbox, you will use an FTP program such as SmartFTP, FireFTP or FileZilla to access it.

Open the FTP program installed on your computer, and enter the FTP Dropbox Settings listed on the Account tab of your Control Center, under Client Settings (on the left side of the page). Your settings will look like this (substitute your domain name for your-domain.com and your mailbox name for mailbox):

FTP server: ftp.your-domain.com

Username: mailbox@your-domain.com

Password: your mailbox password

You can also use a Web browser, such as Internet Explorer, Firefox or Chrome to access an FTP Dropbox via a special URL:

ftp://mailboxname.yourdomain.com@ftp.yourdomain.com

Note that the first part of this URL is your mailbox email address with a period instead of an @ sign. When you visit this URL in a Web browser, your Web browser will ask you for your mailbox password.

Disabling a Dropbox

Keep in mind that when you disable an FTP Dropbox, you are not deleting the files in the box. You are merely disabling access to the dropbox. To delete the contents of a dropbox you must sign in to your domain via FTP (or by using the File Manager) and delete them from the /dropbox/mailboxname directory. When you sign in via FTP, the /dropbox directory will normally be one level up. To get there, click Parent Directory in your FTP program.